


Still Waters

by futurerae



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: Exhaustion, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Movie(s), Pre-Relationship, at 3 AM, because of the aforementioned exhaustion, missed revelations, plumbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-21 14:16:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7390528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futurerae/pseuds/futurerae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'24-hour Scientific Services,' Doc's ad in the yellow pages says, and this isn't exactly a scientific matter—but when it's the middle of the night and all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a tapered cylindrical metallic fastening device. Or: Marty gets a phone call at THREE IN THE DAMN MORNING and has to go deal with this bullshit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Waters

**Author's Note:**

> Just a hashed-out-in-chat fic that I finally got around to writing. YES I AM STILL WORKING ON ORPHEUS, this just had so little left to be written and I felt like finishing something today.

* * *

Marty's phone is ringing.

It has been ringing for probably a solid five minutes now, though he's obstinately been digging deeper into his pillow and drifting in and out of sleep for most of it so he can't really say for sure. It stops every now and then and then resumes, as if the person on the other end keeps deciding to give up and hang up, and then immediately changes their mind. 

Rolling over to look at his clock upside-down—he hadn't gone to sleep with the lights on tonight, so it takes a little squinting to make the digits out in the meager light from the streetlamps outside—Marty groans in frustration. It is _Three-oh-eight in the morning_. 

There's only one person who would be calling him at three-oh-eight in the morning, which means that damn it, he has to answer.

"Nghello?" he slurs into the mouthpiece, hoping he's at least got the phone the right way around.

 _"Marty!"_ explodes the familiar, panicked voice in his ear, and yep, it's exactly what he thought. _"Marty, I'm sorry, I didn't want to wake you up, but this is a big one and I need another pair of hands."_

"A big whaaa?" Marty blinks in the dark, trying to make sense of this. It's the middle of the night, Doc needs help with… science? Because he does that shit on a 24-hour basis, right, Marty knows this, but he's half asleep and is trying to remember what words are and Doc can cut him some damn slack. "Wait, you're on a job?"

Over the phone, Marty can hear the sound of water escaping under high pressure, almost a hiss. And splashing—a lot of splashing. What the hell?

 _"Yes, of course I am—damn it, where did that wrench go—"_

A metallic clang, more mumbling and swearing. 

"Doc," Marty says. "We talked about this."

 _"I know, I know Marty, but this is too much for me to handle alone!"_ Doc pleads, and the desperation in his voice is, if not entirely unprecedented, certainly unusual. In the background, there's a panicked shout in a voice Marty doesn't recognize.

That's… probably not good. Marty frowns, fingers curling tighter around the phone's mouthpiece. His resolve is wavering and he knows it, but it was _Doc_ who set these rules, who insisted that Marty shouldn't be out so late helping him on school nights. "You realize it's a Wednesday, right?"

The words are barely out of his mouth when the quiet background water noises are shattered by the sound of breaking glass, a violent crack of noise far too close to the handset. He hears Doc suck in a startled gasp. _"Hold on,"_ Doc says, sounding strained, and suddenly Marty is wide awake, heart pounding between his ears. 

"Doc?" he asks, then louder, " _Doc!_ "

No immediate response, just more noise and shouting and more glass breaking, further away.

"Okay," Marty says, feet on the floor, wriggling their way into his sneakers. He reaches for his jacket on autopilot. "Never mind, I'll be right there. Where's there?"

_"6709 Maple... Street? No, wait—ow! What in the name of—Court? Court, not Street!"_

Marty's naturally got a good sense of direction, and he's honed it over years of navigating close to the ground, so he knows that's only one street up and one block over from Doc's place. "Damn, okay, at least it's not too far—" Another crash, this one close to the phone again. "Hey Doc, you okay over there?"

 _"Bring gloves!"_ is the only response, never mind that it's a non-sequitur, and Marty's had a lot of practice in tamping down panic, in not reading too far into these things. He's drawing on that now, is about to reply with the usual flippance, _check Doc, I'll be there soon_. Then he hears another voice in the background, distinctly that of a child, saying in that singsong voice of tattlers everywhere: _"Mooommy, he's getting red stuff all over the phooooone—"_

And okay, now the panic is rising hot and fast up the back of his throat and it's all he can do to actually get the phone into its cradle, to sneak downstairs to the garage without tripping over his own feet in the rush, to find the work gloves his old man had bought hopefully last summer for the deck project that had never actually happened, and to get out the door without waking the entire house.

*

It _isn't_ far, and normally the trip wouldn't take long, but in the early hours of the morning—no, screw that, it's the _middle of the night_ —there are no cars to accelerate his travel. He's left to his own foot power, driving the board onward across uneven paving, and it takes enough time that he has a chance to really try to prepare himself for what kind of scene he might be walking into, here. The panic has faded back a bit, lulled into an acceptable state of background anxiety by the steady roll and clunk of wheels on asphalt, by the desolate peacefulness of a town that hasn't woken up yet.

Except for the family living at the address in question. Marty's willing to bet a lot that they're very much awake.

It's not like there's any way Marty could mistake it anyway—Doc's huge converted moving van is halfway up the driveway, halfway in the street, counting on a lack of traffic at this time of night—but even without the obvious, he would know: _this is the place_. Every light's on, in every window, and there's a tension rolling off of it that he can feel before he even gets to the front door. A hollow, resonant banging is coming from somewhere inside the walls, which strikes him as something houses normally shouldn't do.

The panic rattles its chains in the back of his head; he pushes it back firmly and rings the bell.

A harried-looking youngish woman answers the door, confused and suspicious. "...yes? Um, is this about the noise? Because we're doing everything we can to get it under control, if you can just tell your parents—"

"No, no," Marty says, hands thrown up in a gesture that's half supplication, half _gonna stop you right there_. He's interrupted plenty of these all-hours emergencies, so he knows that a too-bright smile never goes amiss—makes him look alert, competent, even if he's anything but. "I'm, ah, Dr. Brown's assistant? He called, said he needed my help…"

She narrows her eyes for a second, scrutinizing him. Somewhere in the house, there's a crash, followed by an unidentifiable shout. "Really? I was expecting someone—"

"Older?" he interrupts, laughing through the resurging panic because he's been through this bit enough times too and he has no patience right now for mincing words. "It's late, you're tired, and the light's terrible. I know I probably look about twelve, but I promise, it's just that I'm short. Look, can I come in and help, or…?"

"Oh, right, I'm sorry, where are my manners?"

"Nowhere that isn't _completely_ understandable under the circumstances," he says, yawning a little, as she holds the door open for him; he scoots past her, pulling the work gloves from where he'd wedged them in a pocket and struggling into them. "I mean, yeah, it's like… what, 3:30? You guys must be _beat_."

"I don't even know," she says, weary. "I stopped looking at the clocks a while ago. It's right through here." 

She leads him through a neat, well-groomed living room with all the marks of chaos lingering around its edges: a pile of tools scattered by the fireplace; a mess of books and papers that have been dumped on one endtable in a lightning-quick relocation; five chairs that obviously belong in the kitchen crowded into one corner, wooden legs unevenly darkened by water. Two boys are on the couch, fidgeting, hands buried in the cushions—maybe six and eight, still in their pajamas, and they eye Marty tiredly as their mother leads him through to the kitchen.

"And I wouldn't say you look _twelve_ ," she says, a nervous apology in her tone, but Marty's not really hearing it because oh my god, the kitchen looks like goddamned Lake Tahoe. 

There's at least eight inches of water pooled in there; the doorway is clotted up with towels, a levee of soggy, pastel terrycloth assembled in obvious haste, but the edge of the living room's carpet is still starting to take on water. In the kitchen, the table's been pushed off to one side to get it out of the way, but there's a third kid, younger by the others by quite a bit, being _incredibly_ helpful—assuming that the kind of help they need is to have a rampaging toddler splashing around in the mess like Godzilla in miniature. It looks like there's two sources for the water: the freshly exposed pipes under the sink are spewing the stuff at an alarming rate, but there's more coming from—ah, okay.

"Hey, Doc?" Marty says, clambering over the foot-and-a-half of towels and wading over toward where Doc's trying to control the second leak in the back of the cupboard. Well, in the wall that happens to be behind the cupboard, anyway, and that's a pretty ugly, gaping hole Doc's reaching through to get at the offending pipe. "You doing okay there?"

"Marty!" Doc sounds surprised, almost like he doesn't remember calling Marty to ask for his help. "Thank goodness you made it, could you, ah—"

Doc looks around for a moment, seemingly unsure which task to set him to; there are so many possibilities. When he turns, Marty can see that there's a smearing of what looks like blood along the sleeve of his ratty old labcoat, another more dramatic splash of it through his hair. The remains of a broken glass or two litter the countertop. 

Marty swallows tightly, looks away; now's not the time to fuss. "Okay, well, first thing's first, how about I get this kid out of here?"

Doc's eyes widen, looking past Marty, like he's only just now taking in the full scene. "Great Scott, I didn't even—yes, do that, before she hurts herself. I can't let go of this wrench, or—"

"Or we end up in even deeper, got it," Marty says, turning to go after the toddler in question. 

"Be careful!" Doc grumble-shouts, already turning back to the pipe. "There's glass _everywhere_."

Oh _geez_ , there really is. Some of it's floating on the surface, broken off bottoms of tumblers and wine glasses sailing along like boats; most of it's on the bottom, and Marty can feel it crunching under the tread of his shoes as he picks his way carefully across the kitchen. Thankfully for the kid's feet, it tapers off as he gets further from the cabinets, but if she'd decided to wander over toward the living room on her own…

"All right, you," he says, bending to scoop the kid up from behind, sopping wet footie pajamas and all. "Let's get you out of here—"

The moment his hands make contact, the girl's face immediately screws up, and she lets loose with the kind of practiced wail that usually means _I want to get my way_ more than it does _there's something actually wrong with me_ ; Marty's only watched his aunt Sally's kids a few times, when Linda had other plans, but it was enough exposure to be able to tell the difference. "Okay, right," he says, trying his best to keep smiling through the ear-splitting noise, hauling the kid back to the doorway where the mother's waiting beyond the levee. "I know, I know, you wanted to keep playing lake monster. Life's not always fair, kiddo."

 _"Thank you,"_ the mother says, accepting the wet, screaming ball of disappointment and rage from Marty without even a flinch. "I had no idea—there was so much going on, and I didn't even know she was _awake_..."

"Yeah, I think everyone kinda missed it." Marty turns to head back into the kitchen, then glances back, side-eying the levee. "You got any towels left, to dry her off?"

She looks momentarily taken aback, as if she either hadn't thought of that or just wasn't expecting the question. "No, I—I'm sure we can find a blanket or something, but I appreciate the concern."

Marty nods, beats a few fragments of glass off the leather of his gloves, and heads back into the mess for real. He sidles up to where Doc's still got his hands in the cabinet. "Okay, so, what have we got here?"

"What we've _got here_ ," Doc says, grumbling, "Is the kind of mess designed for an octopus."

"Need eight hands, huh?"

"Well, four at least, and presumably two legs to stand on, so I—here, hold this wrench in place?" Marty does as he's asked, taking over with the wrench that's latched to the offending pipe, to free Doc to move elsewhere. Doc gathers tools noisily, shifts downstream to the veritable flood coming from beneath the sink. "So technically, I suppose a hexapod would do, or any of the multi-limbed cephalopods, but only an octopus would have the intelligence necessary to—" 

"Doc," Marty says, pulling steadily on the wrench; there's still water leaking out around the edges, but it's nothing compared to before. "Let's focus here, okay?"

"Of course," Doc says from the sink, and it's amazing how much calmer he already seems, just since Marty's gotten onto the scene. "We're going to need to time this perfectly; if I attempt to seal _this_ leak without the correct amount of force applied to _that_ one, I suspect that the added pressure will blow it wide open."

"You suspect?"

"Plumbing isn't exactly my _forte_ , Marty. But doing anything is just a matter of astute observation and correctly anticipating consequences."

"O...okay," Marty says, and he can't find any fault in that, but… "...but why don't we just kill the water main?"

"You think I didn't think of that?" Doc sounds distracted, a little amused, a little annoyed. He's trying to bend low to reach under the sink, but it isn't really working, and after going through about six different positions—head bobbing up and down like the pipe is some moving thing he needs to track—he finally gives up and just drops to his knees in the water, wincing a little on the landing. 

_More glass_ , Marty thinks, and then: _Focus, you can worry about that later._

"The valve was rusted through," Doc continues, reaching for another wrench and disappearing under the sink with it. "The handle broke off when they tried to turn it. That's around when they realized they needed to call someone."

"Of course it did," Marty says, because yeah—it wouldn't be a Doc-style 3 AM emergency if _anything_ had gone smoothly.

"Ready?" Doc asks, voice hollowed by the narrow, echoing space he's inserted himself into.

"Yeah, Doc," Marty holds fast to his wrench, preparing to put his weight on it if necessary. "I'm ready."

*

In the end, Marty wouldn't be able to say their timing was _perfect_ , but it was close enough. Both pipes are sealed finally, gurgling unhappily with some kind of improvised clamps holding the patches in place. They'll have to be cut out and replaced with properly welded-in new pipe segments, but the water's got to be off for that so they'll need to get an _actual plumber_ in to fix the shut-off valve. So, whatever. Their work here is done.

Or it would be, if there wasn't still a lake that needed bailing out.

"Some real _science_ we're doing, here," Marty says, laughing a little. He's picking broken glass out of the sink as Doc empties bucketful after bucketful of water into it; he's the one with the gloves, after all. 

"If you want me to continue paying you for your services," Doc says, straightening up with a fresh bucket, pouring it off down the drain. "You shouldn't balk at how I acquire the funds to do so." And if it were a more sane hour, he would probably have put effort into making it sound like an actual rebuke, but as it is, all he can scrape up is tired, fond amusement.

So Marty laughs again, rubbing the back of his wrist across his forehead. "I guess pure science in the middle of the night isn't actually in very high demand."

"No, sadly, it's not. It's a shame I didn't realize that before I had the truck printed." Bucket, splash, bend down for more. "There's plenty of space on that panel to list other, alternate services. Amateur plumbing, for one."

"Amateur computer repair."

"Unavoidable, when you consider how new the technology is. Experts are fairly scarce."

"Amateur electrical work."

"Indeed."

"Amateur firefighting."

" _Marty_ ," Doc says, sharper, but he's still smiling through it, a flat, exasperated almost-grimace that Marty is _completely_ familiar with. "That was only the once, and it wasn't our fault that the homeowner had no idea where the wiring had been run." 

"Most people don't exactly have a map of that kind of thing."

"Well, perhaps they _should_ ," Doc says, waggling his eyebrows a little to drive the point home, which draws Marty's attention back to the fact that Doc's still got a pretty dramatic bleed going on up there, buried somewhere in his hairline.

Marty frowns, sets aside the two large chunks of glass he's managed to rescue from the drain. Most of what he's fished out so far are large pieces that have been floating; the crunchy stuff on the bottom, now that the water's mostly cleared, is gonna have to be shop-vac'ed or something. That's something for the owners to handle. 

"Hey, Doc," he says, carefully pulling the gloves off, a finger at a time. "Let me take a look at that, okay?"

* *

Maria Alverez has had a _very long night_ , she comments to herself as she realizes that her youngest—changed into dry pajamas at least—has vanished _again_. The boys are in bed, as they should have stayed in the first place, but little Jess somehow managed to wander off from right under her nose, _again_. It's been stressful enough, dealing with all the creaks and quirks of a new home, much less having to find someone to fix the plumbing in the middle of the night only to realize that their only option was apparently the town nutcase, to listen to Judy at the supermarket talk about it.

She'd laughed, at the time, a little nervous, gossip never having been her thing. But after speaking with him for more than five minutes, she’d started to really wonder. Still, it isn't in her nature to judge people by anything but their actions— 

—oh, there Jess is. Standing at the dam they'd hurriedly built at the kitchen entrance hours ago, peering sneakily over the top of it.

Shaking her head, Maria stoops to pick her up, anticipating more bawling—then freezes. 

"Hey, Doc," the kid in the kitchen is saying, setting his gloves aside, stepping right up into Dr. Brown's personal space. "Let me take a look at that, okay?"

Brown doesn't seem at all perturbed by the proximity, just blinking down in confusion. "At what?"

"Oh, man. Leave it to you to not realize that you're bleeding," the kid says—she thinks she heard Brown call him Marty—and he seems so genuinely concerned, so achingly familiar in the way he's talking to his supposed employer, that Maria can't help but feel like she's looking in on something _private_. 

Marty gestures to Brown's head, then grasps his arm by the wrist, turning it over to show where red has soaked through the white fabric of the labcoat. "C'mon," he says, giving the wrist a tug, "Sit down for a second and let me make sure they're not bad, before I worry myself to death."

Maria blinks, watching as Marty casts around for something that will serve as a seat—all the chairs have been removed to the living room—finally settling on a three-step step-stool that's propped up against the laundry room door. She hadn't even really registered that Brown had been injured, that anyone was having a harder night than she was. 

"Well, we can't have that," Brown says, voice warm and affectionate. He settles down onto the top step of the stool, obviously exhausted, and proffers his arm for inspection. 

Then this kid—who obviously isn't literally twelve but who can't be more than sixteen, hauled out of bed on a school night, working as a paid assistant to a supposed crackpot _probably_ because his family's broke and he needs the money—just peels back the soaked fabric of the older man's sleeve and turns the injury into the light with heartbreaking gentleness and care. It's almost like...

"Okay," Marty says, sounding relieved. "This one's not too bad."

"I could have told you as much."

"Because you can see it, yeah. Humor me? Anyway, you can't see your own head," Marty says, moving his hands up to Brown's hair; the scientist dutifully ducks his head a little, folds his hands into his lap, waits out the examination with more patience than Maria thinks even she could muster in the circumstances, and she's got three kids. "What happened, anyway?"

"Several glasses fell from the top of the cabinet; I can only assume they struck one another and broke on the way down, or else you'd be tending to a bruise rather than a laceration."

"That would be kind of silly."

"It would. As things stand, I don't think there's much to worry about either way."

Marty doesn't seem to totally agree; he carries on carefully picking through the older man's hair, probably making sure there's no glass in the cut. "Maybe, but it's sure bleeding a lot. I know, I know, that's what scalp wounds do, I'm just saying—it should probably at least be bandaged or something."

"That can wait until I get home."

"I'll have to come with you," the kid says, matter-of-fact, "I don't trust you to do it yourself in the mirror and not, I don't know, pass out and hit your head on the sink or something."

Brown laughs at that a little, an inexplicable bubble of amusement, and even Marty seems thrown off. "What?"

"Nothing, nothing. Just life, being ironic."

Marty hesitates, one hand still threaded through Brown's hair—then steps back, offering the hand to help him up from the stool. "Right now, I'll settle for life being _unconscious_."

"You'll get no argument from me." 

Maria finally snaps out of her observation of the unexpected little scene, because it's too late and she's too tired to process all of this. She just makes a mental note to tell Tony to pay the man a little more than what they'd agreed to, to compensate for him being injured on the job, then finally hauls Jess—with no fussing this time, just as transfixed as her mother had been—back off to bed.

* *

Emmett knows that this has been an unusually late night, even for these kinds of jobs, and that when he had called, Marty would have been completely within his rights to just roll over and go back to bed. He'd shown up instead, and been invaluable as always, and he'd _barely_ even argued about it, so when the homeowners meet them in the driveway and the husband peels an extra pair of twenties out of his wallet—for the lateness and the injury, he says—it seems reasonable to just turn and hand them both off to Marty.

"Whoa, whoa," Marty says, trying to hand them back. "You're the one who got hurt, and you need it more than I do."

Emmett claps a hand on Marty's shoulder, hoping camaraderie will do what simple refusal never manages to; Marty's a stubborn guy in the face of straightforward obstacles, more so than most people in his life even realize. "Don't be ridiculous, Marty. You earned it." 

"Maybe, but I don't have an electric bill coming due in three days. I don't have to pay for my own food yet, either."

Emmett raises his eyebrows. "How did you know about the electricity—"

Shrug. "If you wanna keep something a secret, maybe don't stick it on the fridge with a bunch of big red circles drawn all over the due date?"

Emmett's about to retort—really, he'll think of something suitable any moment now—when he realizes that they still have an audience. He looks up, can feel the sheepish look on his face even as he tries to tamp it down.

The homeowners are just staring at them, in open curiosity. Not speculation, not yet, but something close to it, like they didn't expect the great crackpot Emmett Brown to have anything resembling a friend, to have anyone voluntarily joining him in his endeavors or entangled in his life.

Emmett turns back to Marty, accepts one and _only_ one of the bills back; it seems like the easiest way to make a quick exit. "We'll split it; does that seem fair?"

Marty looks at the bill in his hand; he looks at Emmett, then at the homeowners, this young couple only recently here in Hill Valley with all their ideas and preconceptions not yet set in stone. 

"Yeah, okay," he says, offering his brightest smile, pocketing the twenty. "That works."

From there it's just a matter of getting to the van and getting out of here. Two steps out, Emmett is hit by a dizzy spell that might be the exhaustion or the head injury or both, and after Marty ducks under his arm to steady him, he informs Emmett that _he'll_ be driving them back to JFK, learner's permit or no. The hour's taking its toll, and it's all Emmett can do to clamber up into the passenger side and watch Marty toss the skateboard in after him before circling the cab to climb into the driver's seat.

Then, homeward.

*

There's an owl or maybe a mourning dove calling outside, the pre-dawn light through the high windows making everything look slippery and grey. Emmett sits on the edge of his bed where Marty parked him half an hour ago, in dry clothes and with both of his lacerations cleaned and bandaged as well as they can be. He would normally balk at being cared for as if he weren't capable of doing it himself, but he cannot find a time in recent memory when he's been this _tired._

"All right, well," Marty says, peering at his watch; that model doesn't have a backlight, so he has to look closely. A yawn catches him mid-syllable. "I guess I should be getting back home."

Emmett eyes him. Marty's clothing is soaked, and there's still a chill out there; add in the convection factor of moving through the cool air with some considerable speed… "Don't you have a spare set of clothes stashed around here somewhere? After that disaster with the acid titration last summer?"

Marty just blinks, dazed. Then comprehension dawns, and he leans to one side, socks squishing noisily in his sneakers. "Oh, yeah, actually, good call," he says, ducking to pull open the bottom drawer of Emmett's dresser. "Huh, these are really old," he says, a t-shirt and a pair of worn old jeans appearing from the back corner. They land on the dresser's cluttered top, and then a pair of socks joins them—and then Marty just starts changing, right where he is.

Which. Which is a thing that's happened before—ever since the incident with the acid and the attendant chemical shower, there hasn't seemed to be much point in modesty—but Emmett's drained and his mental filters are not really operating and the lighting is so strange, so surreal. So when Marty shucks the wet jeans, oblivious to how that lighting picks out the lean tone of his musculature, Emmett has to force himself to restrict his mental commentary to: _it's a result of all of the skateboarding he does, very healthy,_ and nothing more.

"Wow," Marty says, shaking out the dry jeans; the knees are holey, the bottoms a little frayed. "I wore these to _death_."

 _I'm just tired,_ Emmett thinks, pressing a hand across the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. _Yes, objectively, he's very aesthetically pleasing; any idiot with eyes can see that. Good genetics, despite all odds. But so is a statue in a museum, and he's_ sixteen years old _, and despite what popular media might claim to tell us, nothing good can come of that._

"Doc?" Marty asks, concern in his voice. The shuffling of fabric tells Emmett that he's nearly done changing.

_Great Scott, I've been awake too long, or that head injury is more serious than I thought. Why am I even thinking about his age, as if I'm actually considering..._

"You okay? Is your head…?"

 _He never stops worrying about me, does he?_ Emmett wonders, with a sudden hit of clarity. _Maybe I'm just not used to..._

"I'm fine, Marty," Doc says, peeling his hand away pointedly. He packs the line of thought away, for now. "It's just been a very long night." 

"...okay. Uh." The mattress dips a little as Marty perches on the edge of it next to him, reaching up to check the bandage one last time. He's sitting closer than he really needs to be, his touch feather-light. "I'll stop by after school to check on you, so you better be taking it easy, okay?"

It's a small cut; it hadn't required stitches. Well-cleaned as it is, it shouldn't even be an infection risk. "Of course."

"Okay," Marty says again, and something of Emmett's tension must be bleeding over to him for him to be repeating himself like this. He gets up again, grabs his skateboard from where it's propped near the dresser, wheels around to take a few backward steps toward the door while still facing into the room. "I guess I'll see you?"

"Thank you, Marty," Emmett says, on an impulse; he knows he's likely to find that extra twenty squirreled away somewhere in the room later on, and his gratitude—for Marty coming out to help, patching him up, just being here, just being who he is—might be the only thing he can get his friend to actually accept and keep.

Marty just smiles—that bright, hopeful smile that Emmett's never seen him bestow on anyone else, arrogant as that observation might be. "Hey, no problem," Marty says, and like that he's gone, through the door and out into the early morning. 

For a long few moments, Emmett just sits on the edge of the bed. In this quiet time that isn't really day or night, he just sits and listens to the lonely, rattling noise of the board retreating, wondering idly what exactly he's done to earn access to that sound—to deserve this bright, wonderful person in his life, to deserve to sit here warm and cared for while far away, those wheels are whispering across the blacktop like a secret. 

Then he snorts a tired laugh at his own sentimentality—useless, meaningless, unscientific in the extreme—and rolls under the blanket to finally get some much-needed rest. Even then, as he's drifting off, he knows that it isn't useless, that it does _mean something_ , but there are structures that need keeping and things he's been telling himself for decades for a _reason_ , and it's best to humor them, sometimes. No matter what's hiding under them, no matter what terrifying, beautiful new strangeness is shifting under the surface. 

He eventually falls asleep, and all through the morning, he dreams about water.

* * *


End file.
